Building community

Lydia Laurenson’s interview My Life In The Co-Living Scene, and Related Alt Culture Observations wrestles with shared culture and community.

I found myself having surprising agreements with the right wing when I started getting into that community, a few years back. For example — before I met anyone on the right wing, I had intuited this concept of “luxury beliefs,” and then later, I found out that this was a phrase that people use a lot in the “dissident right” or “New Right” community. Years ago, I had this idea that there are types of lifestyle experimentation that wealthier people can easily afford to do, and I suspected that those same lifestyle experiments are higher-risk for less wealthy people. Years ago, I would try to talk to my liberal friends about this idea, and often what people said was that I was unfairly gatekeeping. But when I eventually made some friends on the New Right and talked to them about this idea, they already knew what I meant. So I began to see that there was a funny meeting of the minds for me with some people on the right wing.

[⋯]

Having crossed so many lines politically, I feel like I can see the outlines of the culture underneath the Discourse. I feel like the core issue underneath everything we’re talking about, all these different lifestyle experiments, is that the baseline culture is a mess. And the culture war isn’t helping.

Our “normal” culture is so hard on people right now. So many people have trouble forming basic long-standing bonds. This really matters to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

[⋯]

Our society needs to have a real serious conversation about interpersonal commitment and morality. But I think that’s everyone, it’s everywhere, not just weirdos in the Bay Area. The whole culture is a mess.

So I used to be very focused on these countercultural ways of living. I thought it was important that more people be accepting of alt lifestyles, not in an evangelical sense but because I thought alt communities had insight on how to do this stuff better. Now I'm less like that. I feel like I have seen the Matrix on all these cultural issues because I understand both the liberal and the conservative perspective. What is real underneath the culture war narratives?

Where and how can we create stable communities with members who truly support each other? Is it in the form of a liberal co-living space? What about a conservative religious village? I almost don’t even care anymore about the affiliation of people who are creating a community. I mean, I do care because I want to be part of a healthy culture and I want to fit in. But I also just want the culture to work for some people, somewhere, over a long period.

I made a comment there which I want to also have captured here:

As someone who has developed my own (notably childless) alt micro-community, I think a lot about how hard it is to build community networks in the face of shattered cultural norms & skills, and how I would not have it in me to build what is necessary for healthy childrearing. I grant that the broad right are pointing to real problems emergent from lost shared-community-capacity, while the broad left whom I align myself with shy away from even recognizing it.

But of course the right are confused about the roots & remedies. They want to blame feminism and The Queers and so forth for screwing things up. They think that we can just return to the 1950s dream of the suburban nuclear family if we just Try Harder and punish deviance enough. But that is not just an ugly dream because of its intolerance. It is also doubling down on the very thing which ate the seed grain of our shared-community-capacity: the atomization inherent in suburban life and the nuclear family.

Addressing our need for shared-community-capacity aligned with left cultural sensibilities requires a radical vision of what we want the social order to look like, exploring genuinely novel social forms. I tremble with dread at attempting society-wide transformation of that profundity; history is rich in cautionary tales about unintended consequences. But pursuit of the Suburban Nuclear Family Dream is one of those cautionary tales. The only way out is through to something new.